Loyal Americans still see this country as the Land of the Free. But increasingly, immigrants and illegal aliens regard the United States as the Land of Free Stuff, with goodies for all who manage to get here.

We saw that ideology played out during the Caravan melodrama this spring, where several hundred Central Americans traversed helpfully lawless Mexico to reach and cross the American border. The Centrals were filled with a sense of entitlement, doubtless fueled by the immigration lawyers who coached them about how to speak the magic words about having a “credible fear” that would unlock U.S. asylum policy.

One of the Caravan gaggle, a young Honduran named Carlos Jose Diaz, claimed that he was qualified for American freebies because of his misery and victimhood: “Trump is not a god, and he doesn’t know how much we have suffered, how the people of Honduras suffer, have endured so much crime.”

As a healthy young man, Carlos in earlier times might have joined up with a revolutionary outfit to fight for his country. InNicaragua for example, the Sandinistas fought and won against an oppressive government — they were commies, but at least they believed in something beyond stealing American jobs and welfare benefits.

But instead of being a patriot of his nation, Carlos chose to be an illegal alien moocher, like so many of his countrymen. Another alien caravanster, Irineo Mujica, hoped that a personal, emotional appeal to President Trump would do the trick: “We want to tell the president of the United States that we are not criminals, we are not terrorists, that he gives us the opportunity to live without fear. I know that God will touch his heart.”

When the Caravan aliens reached the border, they compounded their lawlessness by insulting the nation they demanded to join. Some of the group sang the Honduran national anthem, and a couple dozen climbed the border fence, waving anti-borders signs and the Honduran flag. One sign read “Asylum Is a Right,” an unsubtle expression of the anti-sovereignty group, Pueblo Sin Fronteras (People Without Borders) that organized the trip.

Of course, singing the anthem of the home country at the border crossing is the act of an invader, not an immigrant. As television host Tucker Carlson observed on April 30, “Some waved Honduran flags when they got to the top [of the fence]. And that tells you everything. When you arrive in a country to contribute to it and to assimilate into its culture, you don’t wave the flag of a foreign nation. That’s what you do in triumph when you invade a country.”

In the socialist one-worlder view, anyone on earth who wants to live in a first-world economy can just walk in, as is done daily on America’s southern border.

Hillary Clinton is one of the more eminent globalists. In 2013, she stated in a WikiLeaked speech to Latin American bankers, “My dream is a hemispheric common market, with open trade and open borders.”

That Western Hemisphere is home to some of the poorest nations on earth, including Haiti and Honduras; nevertheless Clinton also believed her open-borders scheme would empower “growth and opportunity for every person in the Hemisphere,” which was a remarkably globalist sentiment for an aspiring U.S. President. Voters normally prefer a candidate who promises to put Americans first, as was demonstrated on November 8, 2016.

Interestingly, one of the best defenses of the nation state came from Vaclav Klaus, a Czech economist and politician who was the president of the Czech Republic from 2003 to 2013 after it disentangled itself from the Soviet Union. As one who had lived under one-worlder communism, Klaus observed, “ You cannot have democratic accountability in anything bigger than a nation state.”

These days, too many in the Third World see immigration of various legalities to be the solution to an array of troubles.

Does your job not pay enough in El Salvador or Guatemala? Just relocate to the one-time “nation of laws,” which has for decades allowed its own working people to be battered by the assault of job-stealing, law-breaking foreigners — but hey, the aliens are better off.

Got a crime problem in your country? Just leave, and hope the gangsters who terrorize the place don’t follow, asthey often do. Obama’s generosity ofinviting Central Americans to enterby the tens of thousands also brought ahuge infestation of MS-13 gangsters,who have proceeded to rape andmurder.

But accepting immigration anarchy as some sort of twisted liberal kindness is wrong. On a planet with a growing population of overseven billion people, whole countries like Syria and El Salvador cannot be abandoned: they need to be fixed by their own citizens. As part of that effort, America must refuse to be the world’s flophouse and welfare office.

The world is becoming a very different place because of human population growth, but the political leaders haven’t figured out the ways in which the presence of nearly eight billion persons changes life on earth. In many categories, we as a species are more boxed in and have less room for error regarding resources like water and farmland.

First, consider how we got to this point. The human race did not reach one billion persons on the planet until around 1800, but in 130 years, that total doubled. And in the last century, the graph line has gone radically upward.

Here’s another way to think about the unprecedented human growth on the Earth. Today, in mid-2018, the planet population clock shows over 7.6 billion people. So, if you were born in 1972 (when Nixon was president) or before, the world population has doubled in your lifetime. If you were born in 1942 or before, the world population has tripled in your lifetime.

Human overpopulation may directly contribute to some disasters such as deforestation, but that unspeakable component is often ignored while politicians and media focus on a more convenient cause. It has become politically incorrect to say there are too many people using up a resource or creating monster traffic jams.

Just a few months ago, Cape Town, South Africa, was suffering from the worst drought in a century, to the point where water was limited to 13 gallons per day per person. At that point, severe adjustments to normal life must take place for ordinary people to survive. Today’s Cape Town’s population is four million, a quadrupling since 1960. Four million people certainly use a lot more water than one million, but a trendy blame object these days is Climate Change, even though drought has been a civilization killer throughout history.

Fortunately, some rain has fallen in South Africa in recent months, so the terrifying “Day Zero” has been pushed back to 2019. If and when Day Zero is declared, home and business taps will be shut off and people will have to stand in line with armed guards to receive their daily ration of water. Former Cape Town mayor Helen Zille remarked in a January article, “The question that dominates my waking hours now is: When Day Zero arrives, how do we make water accessible and prevent anarchy?”

The droughts of the overpopulated future will shock us.

California had a very close call and was lucky that its crushing five-year drought was followed by a near-record winter rainy season in 2016-17. Unfortunately, California is also overpopulated when its historically irregular water supply is considered: the state is now approaching 40 million, of whom 27 percent are foreign born as of 2016, according to the Census. Its Sanctuary state designation was signed into law by Gov. Jerry Brown in October 2017, which certainly rolls out the welcome mat for an unlimited number of illegal aliens. It is likely that the state’s population will continue to snowball far beyond water-supply sustainability with an unfettered growth in the number of foreign persons; meanwhile citizens are fleeing the expensive, poorly run state for a recognizable America.

Automation is a topic that does not show up in discussions of immigration, but it should. Technology experts forecast that very significant job loss will occur in a decade or two when smart machines become cheaper than human workers. That’s a tough argument to make now, when the jobs economy is booming, but Silicon Valley inventors dream of a big payoff when they design the perfect robot or workplace software. One example is Amazon’s purchase of Kiva robots in 2012 for $775 million, which enabled the company to greatly increase its productivity and made the robot designers very rich.

With the potential of great wealth resulting from tech innovation, automation projects are going forward at this minute in many job categories, from farm robots to ordering tablets in restaurants, self-driving cars, human-free factories — deleting a host of other occupations that once provided employment for people. We can see the beginning of the workplace transformation happening now.

The experts predict the automation toll on jobs will only get worse. Oxford University researchers forecast in 2013 that nearly half of American jobs were vulnerable to machine or software replacement within 20 years. Rice University computer scientist Moshe Vardi believes that in 30 years humans will become largely obsolete, and world joblessness will reach 50 percent. The Gartner tech advising company predicts that one-third of jobs will be done by machines by 2025. The consultancy firm PwC published a report last year that forecast robots could take 38 percent of U.S. jobs by 2030. Last November the McKinsey Global Institute reported that automation “could displace up to 800 million workers — 30 percent of the global workforce — by 2030.”

Washington remains asleep to the automation revolution that is coming, as it shows by treating the immigration issue as if nothing has changed to affect the alleged need to import human workers.

Immigration is often seen a benefit for sending countries, but that view is short sighted. The export of workers is often a crutch for corrupt nations that are in severe need of reform, particularly when remittances from the U.S. form a big chunk of the GDP. One example: a Pew Research report from last January noted that “remittances from Salvadorans abroad in 2016 were equivalent to 17.1 percent of the country’s GDP. More than 90 percent of the $4.6 billion the country received in remittances came from the estimated1.42 million Salvadoran immigrantsliving in the U.S.”

The same Pew research came up with a shocker statistic: $138,165,000,000in remittances wassent fromthe United Statesto other countries in 2016. If that fact showed up in the mainstream media, I sure didn’t see it. This country is having its wealth removed and shipped abroad by the millions of immigrants and illegal aliens residing here. Allowing remittances to prop up corrupt nations is bad for us and bad for them. The dependency on easy remittance money from the U.S. in the Third World tends to maintain the status quo and dull any urges toward reform.

Immigration should be seen in the same light, namely as a retrograde force in national development. Now more than ever before, people need to stay put and fix the home countries.

There are tools available for economic improvement, particularly microlending, a program that promotes entrepreneurship by making small loans to women in a supportive group setting. Started in Bangladesh by economist Muhammad Yunus in 1976, the Grameen Bank is based on the idea that the poor need credit, not charity. The microlending bank currently provides more than $2.5 billion per year in loans to 9 million women around the world who are engaged in building their own small businesses. The remarkable success of the Grameen Bank shows that appropriate self-help programs for the people of impoverished countries can effectively lessen Third World poverty. The poor do not need to be rescued by means of immigration to the U.S.

Finally, as Dr. John Tanton wrote in 1994, “Welcoming international migration — legal, and especially illegal — is no longer a practical option for almost all of the world’s people. Rather, they will have to bloom where they are planted if they are to bloom at all. They will have to work to change conditions they don’t like rather than just move away from them. Helping make it possible for them to stay rather than leave is the proper focus for our efforts.”

That message is even more appropriate today, 2018, when the number of residents on Planet Earth is two billion more than in 1994, when the total was 5,670,319,703. America must withdraw the welcome mat for the good of all. ■